Update: Bungie has posted a thread on X responding to community criticism of its plan to slowly roll out a second re-release of the "Brave" weapons that will appear in the "Into the Light" update. As of April 30, players will be able to collect the entire set. It will take more than a full month to get the limited edition Godroll Perk combo they are chasing. The thread emphasized that the Guardian will be swimming in loot in the new Onslaught mode, where these guns will drop. This news seems to have placated players, meaning that they can reset their "days since the last Destiny 2 crisis" clocks. Frankly, the hands are almost worn out at this point.

Original Article We're less than two weeks away from Destiny 2's "Into the Light" update, and for the most part it's going to be a pleasant change of pace. The much-requested new horde mode should facilitate build crafting in the final months of this extended season. And the returning "brave" weapons are a nice touch all around.

Yes, the Mad Lads have put Recombination on the mountaintop, giving Hammerhead the ability to run Rampage and Killing Tally at the same time. They even put Envious Assassin and Bait and Switch on Edge Transit, a meme grenade launcher, so players no longer have to suffer through Trials of Osiris to grind out Cataphract, the current DPS meta king! The new edition of the game is still in the works, and it will be available in the next few months. Sure, there are some oddities, such as not knowing why they are reprinting Hung Jury SR4 again even though the previous reprint can still be used to focus with Zavala, but overall, this should be an easy dupe for the desperate Bungie team.

But oh, no, not again. Instead of celebrating, the community is angry about one particular aspect of the upcoming release: on DestinyTheGame's subreddit, the discussion thread for the blog post announcing the reissue weapon perks has more than twice as many comments as upvotes. The reason for this is buried at the bottom of Bungie's post: [The Recluse, Hung Jury SR4, Succession, Edge Transit, Elsie's Rifle, Falling Guillotine, etc., half of these will be available starting April 9. The rest will be unlocked one each week until the week of May 21."

This means that of the 12 weapons that will reappear as part of Into the Light, only six will be available at launch. The rest will be offered on a weekly basis. In other words, there is a time limit.

"I don't understand why they decided to do it when they knew the player base would completely hate this decision," u/StarAugurEtraeus wrote in a post that, at the time of writing, tops the subreddit with over 3,500 upvotes.Into I thought the whole goal of the Light was to incite people to buy 'Final Shape,'" u/apackofmonkeys wrote in one of the top replies to that post. "But they've gone ape-shit as usual, killing the hype by dropping the loot and leaving only two weeks for the limited edition of the final weapon to be taken away. They have learned absolutely nothing." A reply to an unrelated comment by the Destiny 2 community team gives a good idea of the current situation:

The response is entirely predictable. Of all the complaints players have had about Destiny 2's season model over the years, "time gating" is one of the biggest. Even in a good season, the way new content is delivered slowly from week to week can wear players down.

Regardless of the pros and cons, for the community, time gating is a symbol of a growing distrust of Bungie's motives and the idea that the studio values player engagement metrics and weekly active users over the goodness of the game. Whatever the actual reasoning behind this decision, what is more important is the perception. And the perception here is that Bungie is once again resorting to desperate measures to monopolize players' time, and it doesn't help that Bungie clearly knew this would be a source of confusion. in a nearly hour-long stream talking about the loot of Into the Light the time gating of weapons was not mentioned, and was quietly written at the bottom of the article announcing the perks.

It is worth noting that Into the Light is not going away. Onslaught mode and its weapons will still be available when The Final Shape is released in June. However, each weapon has a limited edition with special ornaments, and these will only be available before the expanded edition comes out. This means that if the last weapon is released on May 21, players will only have two weeks to farm to get their hands on that limited edition. If it was a "mountaintop" or a "midnight coup," God help us all.

This release trend will also weaken the impact of the April 9 "Into the Light" launch: the Recluse is indeed a monster, but much of its performance has already been replicated by other void SMGs currently in the game. Edge transit will definitely be a big one, especially as more people realize how good grenade launchers are in today's sandboxes.

Succession is a repackaging of an already craftable raid weapon; as Hung Jury said above, he just got out of the Nightfall rotation with Season of the Witch, so this new variation has some pretty nice perks! Even so, it's still available for focus; Elsie's Rifle is going to have a hard time finding a niche in the meta as a high-impact frame pulse; Falling Guillotine has a similar problem - it was the best legendary sword for years, but that's exactly what it is The reason Bungie nerfed the vortex frame's ammo storage to the point where it has no strong place in the sandbox.

Having 12 weapons available at launch would have been enough to chase around the less exciting re-releases; if Bungie really wanted to avoid overwhelming players, two separate releases, six at a time, would have at least lessened the blow and Even that seems unnecessary. Even that seems unnecessary. The last time there was a non-seasonal release was the 30th anniversary update, which was a paid DLC pack designed to keep players busy after the Witch Queen was delayed. Between that dungeon and the activities in Dares of Eternity, there was enough loot to keep many players willing to stay, even without the time gate.

Now, the mood music feels very different: in 2022, I argued that the seasonal burnout players were experiencing was only going to get worse; "Lightfall" itself was a mess, but there have been strong seasons since; "Deep," " Witch," and "Wish" all stood out for their experimental and entertaining productions. However, community sentiment has never felt so low. [Not that the turmoil within Bungie, including recent layoffs, the departure of game director Joe Blackburn, and suggestions that Sony is unhappy with the direction of the game, has contributed to that perception. But I think the bigger issue is that Destiny 2 often feels like a demanding time commitment. Multiple weekly rotators with unique loot to be earned, festive events with painstaking checklists to complete, weekly deliveries of new seasonal content. Late in a much longer season than intended, the one-shot update was the perfect time to give people something to do, while respecting the majority of those who wanted to spend their time checking out other games. Instead, there's another torment waiting to be chased until just before the new expansion is released.

Ultimately, the stakes here are low: you can completely ignore the FOMO sensation, and all you'll really miss is a gun that looks a little different from the version that has been available forever. At the same time, though, the community reaction was predictable, and it's really odd that Bungie went ahead with it; it seems Bungie can't help but shoot itself in the foot with these little unpopular decisions, continuing to sand down any remaining goodwill from its most dedicated players. It is exhausting to watch. And it diminishes what, in everyone's eyes, should be a fun update worth participating in.